Early Britain eBook

The Anglo-Saxons, when they settled in Eastern and
Southern Britain, were a horde of barbarous heathen
pirates. They massacred or enslaved the civilised
or half-civilised Celtic inhabitants with savage ruthlessness.
They burnt or destroyed the monuments of Roman occupation.
They let the roads and cities fall into utter disrepair.
They stamped out Christianity with fire and sword
from end to end of their new domain. They occupied
a civilised and Christian land, and they restored
it to its primitive barbarism. Nor was there any
improvement until Christian teachers from Rome and
Scotland once more introduced the forgotten culture
which the English pirates had utterly destroyed.
As Gildas phrases it, with true Celtic eloquence,
the red tongue of flame licked up the whole land from
end to end, till it slaked its horrid thirst in the
western ocean. For 150 years the whole of English
Britain, save, perhaps, Kent and London, was cut off
from all intercourse with Christendom and the Roman
world. The country consisted of several petty
chieftainships, at constant feud with their Teutonic
neighbours, and perpetually waging a border war with
Welsh, Picts, and Scots. Within each colony,
much of the land remained untilled, while the clan
settlements appeared like little islands of cultivation
in the midst of forest, waste, and common. The
villages were mere groups of wooden homesteads, with
barns and cattle-sheds, surrounded by rough stockades,
and destitute of roads or communications. Even
the palace of the king was a long wooden hall with
numerous outhouses; for the English built no stone
houses, and burnt down those of their Roman predecessors.
Trade seems to have been confined to the south coast,
and few manufactured articles of any sort were in
use. The English degraded their Celtic serfs
to their own barbaric level; and the very memory of
Roman civilization almost died out of the land for
a hundred and fifty years.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CONQUEST OF THE INTERIOR.

From the little strip of eastern and southern coast
on which they first settled, the English advanced
slowly into the interior by the valleys of the great
rivers, and finally swarmed across the central dividing
ridge into the basins of the Severn and the Irish
Sea. Up the open river mouths they could make
their way in their shallow-bottomed boats, as the
Scandinavian pirates did three centuries later; and
when they reached the head of navigation in each stream
for the small draught of their light vessels, they
probably took to the land and settled down at once,
leaving further inland expeditions to their sons and
successors. For this second step in the Teutonic
colonisation of Britain we have some few traditional
accounts, which seem somewhat more trustworthy than
those of the first settlement. Unfortunately,
however, they apply for the most part only to the
kingdom of Wessex, and not to the North and the Midlands,
where such details would be of far greater value.